Chuck Staben

Charles Alan “Chuck” Staben (born May 3, 1958) is an American academic and university administrator. He is the 18th and current president of the University of Idaho, the state’s land-grant university, having succeeded interim president Donald Burnett on March 1, 2014 after being selected by the State Board of Education on November 18, 2013. He was previously Provost at the University of South Dakota and the Acting Vice President for Research at the University of Kentucky.

Chuck Staben was born in 1958 in Waukegan, Illinois. He has two sisters. His father was an engineer and manager at United States Steel, primarily at the wire products plant in Waukegan. Chuck attended Waukegan Township High School, graduating in three years. In high school Staben was a member of the swim team and tennis teams, was Outstanding Math Student of the Year, and was valedictorian.

Staben attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, majoring in biochemistry. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, he graduated with honors, magna cum laude, in 1978. He earned his doctoral degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984, serving as a graduate research and teaching assistant. Staben completed an industrial postdoctoral research fellowship at Chiron Research Laboratories from 1985–1986 and a postdoctoral research fellowship at Stanford University from 1987-1989.

Moving to the University of Kentucky in 1989, Staben was a professor of biology from 1989–2008, serving as the chair of the biology department from 2000-2004. He taught microbiology, genetics, bioinformatics, and introductory biology, winning awards including the College of Arts and Science’s “Distinguished Teacher Award” from 1997–2000, that college’s most prestigious teaching award. His research focused on fungal developmental biology, bioinformatics, and fungal genomics. He received grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. He has served on NSF and NIH grant review panels and on a National Research Council committee that reviewed the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research and the Institutional Development Award programs for the U.S. Senate.

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